on gesture

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, 2008):

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions--the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them." (23)

"In other words, gesture is outside the domain of the sign insofar as signs are coded and call for a hermeneutics, an interpretive apparatus separable from, and in place prior to, the act of signification. Rather, the mode of action of gesture is enactive, exterior to anything prior to its own performance: it works through bodily executed events, creating meaning and mathematical significance 'before one knows it.'" (36)

This last bit is of particular relevance for my own (meagre) efforts, my circling around what it might mean to read gesture into literature, and particularly the repetitive tick that seems to mark the body's presence in the very moment of its (literary) translation into a (disembodied) sign. Rotman resists Agamben's assimilation of gesture to silence, to aphasia, to memory loss: a crucial contribution in trying to think the history (the re-membering) of gesture.

Here my critical interest in gesture runs into a deeply personal, unexplained attachment to ASL:

This, too, is on my wish list.